J. Child Psychol. Psychiat. Vol. 40, No. 7, pp.

11291139, 1999
Cambridge University Press
' 1999 Association for Child Psychology and Psychiatry
Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved
00219630}99 $15.000.00

A Visually Impaired Savant Artist : Interacting Perceptual and Memory

Representations
Beate Hermelin and Linda Pring with Michael Buhler, Sula Wolff, and Pamela Heaton
University of London, U.K.
In this single case study, paintings by a visually impaired and cognitively handicapped savant
artist are evaluated. He paints his pictures exclusively from memory, either after having
looked at a natural scene through binoculars, or after studying landscape photographs in
brochures, catalogues, and books. The paintings are compared with the models from which
they were derived, and the resulting generative changes are accounted for by an interaction
between impaired visual input and memory transformations.
Keywords : Autistic disorder, art, Idiot Savants, memory, visual handicap.

and on their accurate rendering appears to reflect some of

the characteristics that are regarded as typical for those
with autism.
Another feature of many autistic savant artists is their
outstanding visual memory. When we first met the then
11-year-old Stephen Wiltshire, we took him to St Pancras
Station, an intricate Victorian building. Stephen spent a
few minutes walking around the station, and later drew
an astonishingly accurate and detailed picture of it from
memory. Such domain-specific memory is also found in
savant musicians (Hermelin, OConnor, & Treffert, 1989 ;
Miller, 1989 ; Sloboda, Hermelin, & OConnor, 1985) and
calendrical calculators (Heavey et al., 1999).
However, savant talent can also include other characteristics than those of perceptual accuracy and memory
for detail. It can extend to individual stylistic differences
as well as to transformations and variations of the initial
input. This has been demonstrated in the area of music
(Hermelin, OConnor, & Lee, 1987 ; Hermelin et al.,
1989 ; Miller, 1989). It also is found in some calendrical
calculators who can not only name the day of a week in
past years, but also can do this with novel future years
(Hermelin & OConnor, 1986). We have shown that such
generative output is based on the extraction of rules and
regularities intrinsic to the material which is relevant to
the savants specific talent (Heavey et al., 1999 ; Hermelin
& OConnor, 1986 ; OConnor & Hermelin, 1992). The
formation of such modular structural representations
seems to develop as continuous exposure gradually
transforms a knowledge of single instances into an eventrelated total system, governed by its own rules and
regularities. An emphasis on distinctive, local processing
is held to be characteristic of autistic cognition (Frith &
Happe! , 1994). For instance, absolute pitch is more
frequently found in musically na$ ve autistic children than
in matched controls (Heaton et al., 1998). Thus a local
processing bias, as well as the ability to integrate and
transform these individual elements into structural representations, may underpin savant talent. Transformations

Introduction
The term Idiot-Savants was first used by Langdon
Down in 1887 to describe the concurrence in some
individuals of low general cognitive functioning together
with an above-average specific ability. Such people
appear to be able to use processing strategies within a
particular domain that seems to be independent of their
general level of intelligence. For nearly 200 years such
savants have been noted but in the past reports have
mostly been in the form of descriptive case histories. In
1983 OConnor and Hermelin began a series of systematic
and controlled experimental studies with groups of
musical, calculating, and artistic savants. Subsequently
Hermelin, Pring, and their colleagues have attempted to
account for the marked frequency of individuals with
autism in the savant population (Heaton, Hermelin, &
Pring, 1998 ; Heaton, Pring, & Hermelin, in press ;
Heavey, Pring, & Hermelin, 1999 ; Pring, Hermelin, &
Heavey, 1995).
In discussing the characteristics of the outstandingly
gifted savant artist Stephen Wiltshire, Sacks (1995) posed
the question whether one could speak of a distinctive
autistic art . He points to the concreteness, detailed
perceptual accuracy, and to what he calls the thisness
in the drawings of this talented individual. He observes
that individual savant drawings also often show a
repetitive preoccupation with particular themes, in
Stephens case with cars and buildings. In an assessment
of this savants progress in art school (Pring & Hermelin,
1997) we have drawn attention to his exceptional ability
to depict space and distance in perspective. Such a
remarkable focusing on perceptual details of a display

Requests for reprints to : Beate Hermelin, Psychology Department, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New
Cross, London, SE14 6NW, U.K.
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1130

B. HERMELIN et al.

and variations can occur within such structured global

representations, thus allowing for generative output.
The savant artist whose paintings are assessed in this
study suffers not only from autism and mental handicap
but also from a severe, congenital, visual impairment.
Thus his artistic ability appears to be either independent
of these various handicaps, or alternatively is a consequence of their interacting effects on an inherent talent.

The Savant Artist

Richard was born in 1952 after a normal birth,
although his mother had had glandular fever in the first
trimester of pregnancy. His father reports that Richard

cried a lot from 3 to 6 months of age. When aged 1 month,

bilateral congenital cataract was diagnosed and congenital heart disease was also noted. When 6 years old he
developed lymphosarcoma, which responded well to Xray treatment. At age 18 he was diagnosed as having
insulin-dependent diabetes, for which there is a family
history and which may have caused some additional
retinal damage. Consequently Richard is extremely myopic and his distance vision with glasses is now only 3}60
and 4}60. He has also developed hypothyroidism and
glaucoma, which, however, are well controlled with
medication.
Richard started to walk late and was extremely clumsy
in the early years. From the late beginning of speech at
age 6 he was markedly echolalic and this still persists.
Pronouns are sometimes reversed, and he uses short

Figure 1. Landscape in Poland.

A VISUALLY IMPAIRED SAVANT ARTIST

sentences mostly consisting of nouns and verbs, while

leaving out linking words. He attended nursery school
and then an occupation centre for children with serious
learning difficulties from 6 to 15 years of age. At age 11 he
was seen at the Department of Psychological Medicine,
Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh, and was
diagnosed as suffering from mental handicap. His mental
age on the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale at this time
was 3 years 4 months. Recently we obtained a Verbal IQ
of 47 on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Scale and a
nonverbal IQ of 55 on the Ravens Progressive Matrices.
Richard obtained scale scores of 7 on the Block Design
and Object Assembly subtests from the Weschler IQ test
while his Vocabulary and Comprehension scores were
respectively 2 and 3. The first two scores fall within the
16th top percentile and the two verbal tests fall respectively into the bottom 04th percentile and 10th
percentile. Such a discrepancy between these subtests is a
pattern typically obtained from those diagnoses as
autistic (Happe! , 1994).
Anecdotal reports of Richards early behaviour also
are suggestive of the presence of autism. For example, his
father reports that he did not anticipate or respond to
being picked up and accepted cuddling only passively.
Later, when Dr Sula Wolff of the Department of
Psychiatry, University of Edinburgh observed him, she
noted that his behaviour was characterised by lack of
involvement with classroom activities and an aimless
wandering around the classroom. He never played with
toys and showed no interest in age peers. Collaborating
with us in the present investigation, Dr Wolff was able to
confirm her early impression of autism by assessing
Richard as fulfilling the ICD criterion for the syndrome.
Richards fathers responses to the Diagnostic Interview
for Social and Communication Disorders (Wing &
Gould, 1999) were also consistent with this diagnosis.
Richard began to draw when aged 4 and the drawings
he was producing between the ages of 6 and 7 years Selfe
(1985) described as striking . He has continued to
produce pictures throughout his life and currently paints
for 2 to 3 hours most days. He relies solely on oil-based
coloured crayons to produce his pictures on paper. He
does not enjoy looking at other artists paintings and
hardly ever does so. Instead he goes to his local library
and looks at landscape photographs in books and
geographic magazines, or at brochures at the local travel
agency. He then goes home and after days, weeks, or
months produces a picture from memory based on a
photograph he has previously studied. Sometimes he also
derives his pictures from a natural setting at which he has
looked through his binoculars. Figure 1 represents such a
scene, which he saw when travelling with his father
through Poland and painted from memory after his
return home.
Richard has had many exhibitions all over the world
and his paintings sell so well that he earns his living as a
professional artist. A trust fund has been set up from the
proceeds of these sales in order to secure his financial
future. He has travelled very widely, both to the openings
of shows of his works and for family holidays, usually
accompanied by his father. He has acquired knowledge
about the flags, altitude, temperature, and local time of
the many different parts of the world he has visited, and

1131

in conversation he frequently makes reference to these

places. In addition to his interest in travel, Richard also
enjoys listening to music. Like many other autistic savants
not gifted for music but for art or calendrical calculation,
Richard appears to have absolute pitch. The method to
determine this was based on an earlier study (Heaton et
al., 1998) where recognition and memory for single tones
were initially paired with animal pictures in order to
provide pitch labels. In that experiment pitch identification as well as pitch memory was found to be superior
in autistic children without specific high-level musical
abilities when compared to controls.
Thus we are dealing here with an individual with severe
perceptual as well as cognitive impairments, who is also
diagnosed as being autistic. From an early age he showed
an interest in, and an outstandingly high-level ability for,
producing pictures from memory.

Method
The method adopted here was to compare Richards
paintings with the photographs from which they were derived,
in order to describe and evaluate some of the changes these
showed when produced from memory. We are of course aware
of the inherent methodological shortcomings that such a
qualitative evaluation entails. Nevertheless, it is widely and
almost exclusively used to determine the outcome of
examinations at art academies and colleges, and no alternative
objective or quantifiable method for scoring pictures has as yet
been devised. The present single case study must thus be
regarded as a pilot project, which will serve to refine future
procedures analogous to those used widely in the psychology of
music. Although music appears to have a firmer, more specified
grammatical structure than seems to be the case for the
visual arts, dimensions such as veridity, composition, colour,
and perspective drawing, as well as inventiveness, may be
isolated and quantified in future investigations.
As for the study of Stephen Wiltshires progress in art school
(Pring & Hermelin, 1997), the evaluation of Richards work was
carried out by our collaborator Michael Buhler, a painter
himself as well as a qualified art expert and an experienced
teacher at the Guilds of London Art School. He has never met
Richard but was provided with copies of his pictures as well as
with the initial photographs on which these were based. These
photographs had been identified for us by Richard himself, and
thus provided us with the opportunity for a direct comparison.
One question we asked was whether a true artistic talent, here
defined as an inherent high-level ability for picture production,
was evident. We also attempted to specify the transformations
in the perceptual and}or memory schemata in regard to
compositional and structural features such as simplifications of
form, omissions or additions of details, and changes in distance
and perspective. Special attention was paid to colour and light
rendering leading to changes of the overall mood conveyed
by a painting in contrast to the original colour photograph.
Such a mood transformation, as defined by Michael Buhler,
signifies a personal intention of the individual painter through
the object matter of a picture (Pring & Hermelin, 1997). It thus
contrasts how something is drawn or painted with what
the objects are that the picture represents.

Results
General Assessment
To the question of whether Richards paintings indicated a true artistic talent, here defined as an apparently

1132

B. HERMELIN et al.

A.

B.

Figure 2 A and B. Mountains and Flowers.

A VISUALLY IMPAIRED SAVANT ARTIST

A.

B.

Figure 3 A and B. Tropical Fish.

1133

1134

B. HERMELIN et al.

A.

B.

Figure 4 A and B. Mountain and Yellow Trees Reflected in Lake.

A VISUALLY IMPAIRED SAVANT ARTIST

1135

A.

B.

Figure 5 A and B. Standing Rock against Mountain and Sky.

inherent above-average ability to produce coloured visual

representations on paper, our art expert collaborator MB
answered with an unequivocal yes . He observed that
Richards pictorial space, light, and colour were represented in a nearly abstracted way, which resulted in the
kind of metaphor that related him to the traditions of the
sublime in landscape painting. The paintings show a
happy positive view of the world and portray conven-

tional picturesque object matter. There is nothing threatening in his representations. Richards landscape scenes
of snowy mountain peaks against blue skies, rippling
lakes, and meadows full of flowers were judged as very
different from much of the 18th and 19th century
Romantic art that depicts the awesome grandeur and
power of nature. Richard focuses on light, colour, and
space, and can conjure up very subtle effects of atmos-

1136

A.
B.

B. HERMELIN et al.

Figure 6 A and B. Lake View and Church.

A VISUALLY IMPAIRED SAVANT ARTIST

pheric perspective, colour blending, and luminescence.

There is less emphasis on pattern and he never becomes
obsessionally involved with pattern making in the way
often observed in the paintings of psychiatric patients.
In Richards work, colour tends to be intelligently
limited to show a painting to its best advantage. He is well
aware that more colour need not make for better colour.
Details are thus often suppressed, in order to allow colour
to function without interruption over a larger area. He
does not tend to do very large paintings, presumably
because of his visual impairment. He works very closely
to the surface and the larger a painting is, the further back
from it the artist needs to go in order to see it from a
spectators visual viewpoint. When Richards memory
image is not based on a photograph but on a natural
scene, he has looked at this through his binoculars and
this brings objects that are further away much nearer.
This is reflected in his pictures, where distant items
are brought forward, thus obtaining much greater
prominence than in the photographs.
Richard works with his eyes close to the surface. He
tends to paint in a very structured way, for instance by
starting to put a blue sky (i.e. the backdrop) over the
whole of the paper surface and then superimposing land,
and on top of this, plants, trees, etc. If he wants to put a
house on the land, he will paint the whole of the house,
and then overpaint this partly, or sometimes even
completely, with for instance the branches of the tree. Oil
pastels, which he uses exclusively, have sufficient covering
power to make this feasible. What is of interest, though,
is that even using this medium, most artists would map
out all the objects to be depicted, and fill in the areas with
the roughly appropriate colours from the start. But
though Richards method appears to have lacked an
overall plan, the result is nevertheless a coherent whole.

Models and Pictures

Mountains and Flowers. The picture shown in Fig. 2 A
was painted from memory of the photograph in Fig. 2 B.
It represents a much sunnier version of nature and is
brighter and more optimistic than the model. The sky is
bluer, the light is sunnier, and the flowers are more
intensely yellow and have become larger and much more
prominent. They now dominate the foreground. There is
a formal simplification of the snow on the mountaintop
and a less oppressive rugged shape of the mountains. The
raising of the foreground also makes the mountains more
distant and less threatening. A house has been added and
the impression that the painting conveys has been
transformed from the rather sombre image of the
photograph into expressing a happy joyous mood.
Tropical Fish. As Fig. 3 A shows, the plants in the
foreground as well as the fish are considerably enlarged in
comparison with the model (Fig. 3 B). The fish and the
plants have become a more effectively sized element in the
composition, and there is an effect of light and shadow on
the colours that gives luminosity to the scene. There is a
good effect of underwater atmospheric perspective, and
both in colour and composition the painting is more
clearly structured than the photograph. The white bright
light around the plants gives a good impression of
reflected sunlight, which is not present in the model.

1137

Mountain and Yellow Trees Reflected in a Lake. In this

painting (Fig. 4 A) it is noticeable that the reflection of the
trees in the water, which is an important feature of the
photograph (Fig. 4 B), has less emphasis in the painting.
Instead, the artist has concentrated on the trees and
brightened their colour. He has also produced a very
subtle reflection of them on the right side of the lake. The
snow on the mountaintop has undergone formalisation
into larger patterned shapes and the craggy details of the
rocky mountainside have been softened. Richards painting generates an almost lyrical poetic mood, which is not
present in the photograph.
Standing Rock against Mountain and Sky. There is a
simplification in the painting of the rock in the foreground
as well as an omission of surface detail (Fig. 5 A). This
gives the rock a less realistic, more abstract appearance.
Bright yellow flowers are introduced at the foreground to
add colour, but the small man to the left of the rock, who
serves in the photograph (Fig. 5 B) to give the awesome
scale, is omitted. This was probably because the man in
the photograph was too small for Richard to see. The
mountain is dramatised in the painting by a darkening of
the rock face, and increased contrast is achieved by
simplifying the shape of snow against the detailed surface
of the rock.
Lake View and Church. More license has been taken
here than in the other pictures. In this instance the
photograph has been simply taken as a starting point for
Richards own composition. He has ignored the given
foreground completely and honed in on the church (Figs
6 A and 6 B), for which he has invented his own onionshaped dome. In his painting the church is now set
against autumn trees. The mountains have approached
closer and ducks have been introduced in the foreground.
Summarising the results of this assessment, Richards
most outstanding artistic abilities lie in the depictions of
colour, light, and space. This is most apparent when he is
markedly abstracting from his models, thereby producing
subtle effects of atmospheric perspective, colour blending,
and luminosity. He simplifies shapes, enhances colours,
and omits details, and through such means produces, if
not strikingly original, nevertheless balanced, happy,
harmonious pictorial representations.

Discussion
As far as we are aware, there has been up to now no
report of a pictorial artist who suffers not only from
marked cognitive developmental disabilities, but also
from a severe congenital impairment of visual perception.
To the puzzling question of why somebody born with
such multiple handicaps should have shown from early
childhood a preoccupation with and a gift for producing
pictures, we can at present offer no definite answer.
There seems to be, in this case, no obvious genetic or environmental factors to account for such a predisposition.
Richard not only has an inherent artistic talent but also a
diagnosis of autism. Obsessive preoccupations and a
small repertoire of interests and activities are typical for
autistic individuals, and might well have contributed to
the development of his artistic skill. Whatever his initial
motivation, his talent is not only functioning independently from his general cognitive ability and his autism,

1138

B. HERMELIN et al.

but is also not reliant on a normally functioning visual

input system.
Neither a cognitive nor a visual impairment on its own
needs to preclude artistic ability (Hermelin & OConnor,
1990 ; Trevor-Roper, 1997). For artists functioning on a
normal cognitive level, any visual impairment tends to
become apparent later in life, caused by either accident
(Sacks, 1995) or the normal ageing process (TrevorRoper, 1997). But in some few instances imperfect vision
in great artists also seems to have been present from an
early age. Cezanne, for instance, as reported by TrevorRoper, seems always to have been myopic, a condition in
which light from distant objects is focused before reaching
the retina, resulting in blurred images. Cezanne also had
diabetes, which may have led to some further retinal
damage. Trevor-Roper relates a comment made by a
contemporary of Cezannes who stated An incomplete
talent with an imperfect vision resulted in works that were
always incomplete and sketchy . In contrast, in another
evaluation of Cezannes art it was concluded that he was
an artist with a diseased retina who, exasperated by a
defective vision, discovered the basis of a new art .
Trevor-Roper cites a report stating that when Cezanne
was offered spectacles to correct his myopia he remarked
after looking through them Take these vulgar things
away . He also relates a charming anecdote of Monet,
who also was apparently myopic. When persuaded to
look through corrective glasses, he is reported to have
said My God, I see like Bouguereau who was a very
academic and conventionally naturalistic painter of the
period. These reports confirm that sometimes an apparent
deficit can turn into an asset. It relieves an individual
from direct precise visual input and by necessity gives him
the freedom to impose his own distorted image, thus
generating his own representation of reality.
Richard, in common with other savant artists, has an
extremely good visual memory. This may lead, as for
instance in the case of Stephen Wiltshire (Pring &
Hermelin, 1997), to astonishingly precise representations
of perceptual features such as spatial perspective and very
accurate detail, while retaining a personal style in his line
drawings. Sacks (1995) remarks on the thisness of
Stephens drawings, on the emphasis on what is drawn
rather than conveying the strong personal characteristics
of who drew it. He suggests that there may be a
connection between savant artistic talent and autistic
peoples remarkable capacity for minutely detailed observation and representations, as well as repetitiveness
and stereotypy. In spite of this, he is not certain that one
can speak of a distinctive autistic art , and the pictures
of some other autistic savant artists, including Richards,
suggest otherwise.
Our investigations of about 12 autistic artists strongly
suggest that there is no stereotyped autistic art .
Individual differences in style and subject matter range
from near abstracts, through sensitive subtle portraiture
and Dali-like surrealistic pictures, to precise and detailed
line drawings. These latter often demonstrate a superb
sense of perspective and frequently have an astonishingly
personal and dynamic quality of line.
Savant artists and equally gifted normal individuals
also share some cognitive processing characteristics. Both
groups have good spatial abilities as well as better

recognition of hidden and incomplete figures than is

found in controls (Hermelin & OConnor, 1986). Also,
like artistically gifted children, autistic artists have very
good short- and long-term visual memory (Rosenblatt &
Winner, 1988).
Richards work does not reflect precisely and in detail
the models from which it derives and, though his
intellectual limitations may lead him to adopt uncontroversial representations of a happy harmonious
world free of emotional conflict and disturbance, these
are his own personal interpretations. The complete
picture probably results from an interaction of unclear
and imprecise vision, individual style, and the memory
transformations he performs on his original perceptions.
Thus he adds and omits, changes size and prominence of
some features, and transforms colour. To what extent
this generative process is contributed to by personal
preference, distorted vision, memory transformations or,
most likely, by an interaction of these factors, is not
certain. How memory transformations can operate on an
artists output is for instance illustrated by Sacks (1995)
in an account of a man who, when painting, relied entirely
on his memory of his Italian childhood village. He had
left his home village when he was 9 years old. Sacks
describes these paintings as minutely accurate in perceptual detail yet, in spite of horrendous war experiences,
expressing a strong personal mood of idyll and serenity.
Memory, as Bartlett (1932) pointed out, is not a reexcitation of fixed traces, but is an imaginative, active
reconstruction. Thus imaginative memory can reduce the
influence of actual experience, substituting instead not
only perceptual but also mental transformations represented in the memory schemata. Truly great artists, like
Bonnard in the late 19th and early 20th century, frequently painted their pictures from such memory representations (Watkins, 1998).
We do not, of course, wish to imply here that a savant
artist could ever transform and revolutionise previous
artistic conventions, as did artists like Cezanne, or
generate memory images as evocative as Bonnards.
Though inherent specific talent appears to be to some
extent independent of the level of general cognitive
function and psychiatric diagnosis, such a talent only acts
as a potential starting point. Its full realisation depends
on the use that is made of it. It is a necessary but not a
sufficient condition for outstanding artistic achievement.
True generative power is a function of having something
to say, of finding new ways of saying it, and of acquiring
and perfecting the necessarily technical skills to this end.
Clearly, high levels of thought, depth of feeling, and as
yet undefinable personality characteristics are central to
this process. Idiot-Savants , by definition, are unlikely
to possess such qualities.
Idiot savants, and perhaps particularly those with
autism, have no knowledge of or interest in past or
current art movements. In fact Richard actively dislikes
looking at pictures in art galleries. Savants also lack the
capacity or inclination to assess their own levels of
achievement and set artistic goals for themselves. These
limitations restrict their creative development.
Nevertheless, savants, including those with a diagnosis
of autism, are not excluded from sharing with other gifted
individuals an ability to generate transformations and

A VISUALLY IMPAIRED SAVANT ARTIST

variations of perceptual data and expression of a personal

style. Through what Vigotsky (1939) has called the
uniqueness of the nature of developmental intellectual
impairment they may make their own special contribution and this may, in rare instances, result in a deficit
giving rise to an asset. In the present instance this
uniqueness lies in the interactions between cognitive
and perceptual handicaps, personal style, and a preoccupation with picture production. In Richards
paintings these interacting factors have resulted in
pictures that transform perceptual reality, thereby generating a mood of harmony and serenity through the
enhancement of colour, light, and atmospheric perspective.

AcknowledgementsThis research was supported by the

Nuffield Foundation (Grant reference : DIR}05). We are very
grateful to Richard and Mr Wawro for their helpful support
and cooperation in this study.

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